The Soundgarden track Chris Cornell wanted to sound like a “hillbilly” Black Sabbath
Chris Cornell wasn’t just a grunge star; he made that very clear across his career. If his fully branching out and doing a James Bond theme tune isn’t enough to confirm that he was unafraid to leave the confines of alternative rock’s inner sanctum behind, the career of his main band, Soundgarden, should provide ample confirmation.
Cornell will forever be known to the mainstream as the man who supplied the Casino Royale theme tune, ‘You Know My Name’, an aptly gritty but nonetheless orchestral sonic mirroring of this dark new chapter for 007. This emerged during a period of significant expansion for him, and only a few years later, his 2009 album Scream, an electronic-leaning palette that saw him collaborate with Timbaland of all people, saw him continue to move further away from the fuzzy guitar music that made him.
While many fans were aghast at both endeavours, they shouldn’t have been surprised. One of the critical features of Soundgarden’s operation was that they cleverly pulled from different areas to construct a more multifarious sound than most of the other lauded guitar bands’ that emerged simultaneously. They even rejected the grunge tag and claimed they were more in line with the 1980s post-punk than anything else.
While that particular point is debatable given the many metal-leaning tracks they produced, surely their experimentation with compositional aspects such as structure, dynamics and even tunings does go some way in demonstrating this philosophical inclination. Even Cornell would liken his approach to that of Bob Dylan, the man who bravely stepped out of folk and went electric, thus kicking off a new era for music and culture, despite the immense protestations of some diehard followers.
When speaking to SPIN in 2011, Cornell revealed this experimental spirit again. He explained how for one of Soundgarden’s most famous songs, ‘Rusty Cage’, from 1991’s Badmotorfinger, he sought to stretch the parameters of Black Sabbath’s heavy, sludgy rock and fuse it with country.
He vividly remembered looking out the window at the countryside when Soundgarden’s van was on the road deep in Europe. That situation caused him to feel a mesh of pent-up emotions, and the germ of what became ‘Rusty Cage’ began to materialise in his mind. He never wrote the words down, but when they returned to Seattle, he remembered them. He then picked up a guitar and wrote music to fit the song’s essence.
Of his desire to fuse Black Sabbath with country, he said: “I wanted to create this hillbilly Black Sabbath crossover that I’d never heard before. I thought that would be cool and possible. I thought, ‘If anyone can do it, Soundgarden can do it.’ I was listening to a lot of Tom Waits at the time, and I wondered how Soundgarden could approach similar imagery and I wondered what the music would sound like. ‘Rusty Cage’ is what I came up with.”
Cornell’s looking further afield for inspiration proved to be a masterstroke, giving Soundgarden one of their quintessential tracks. While it is undeniably heavy, looking past the crunching, de-tuned guitars to the country rhythm of the verses or the lyrics themselves, it is clear that there is much more to it than simply the rather umbrella and throwaway tag of grunge. It even made an impact on the country community. The ‘Man in Black’ himself, Johnny Cash, covered it on 1996’s Unchained.
